Page 111 of Alchemised
This was her fault. She’d complied, she hadn’t struggled.
Stroud was still talking to her, speaking more loudly. The words muffled away, the sounds rounded and indecipherable.
The room blurred, threatening to dim. Helena’s throat compressed, strangling her. A sharp stabbing pain ripped through her chest, something tearing open inside of her.
No. Please. No.
Stroud reached out, fingers pressing against the side of Helena’s neck, and Helena started screaming.
Not with anguish as she had with Ferron, but shattering screams like a dying rabbit. Sharp, quick, repetitive. They kept bursting out of her.
Stroud seemed bewildered. She slapped Helena hard across the face.
Helena couldn’t stop screaming.
Everything was bleeding together, the edges of her vision fading.
Ferron was in front of her, his hands on her shoulders.
“Calm down.” His voice was hard, but his hands weren’t. He pulled her close until the world narrowed into the space between them. “Breathe.”
He squeezed her shoulders hard enough to reach through the numbness.
“Come on. You have to breathe.”
Helena managed one ragged breath and burst into tears.
“No …” Her voice rose staccato. “No, no, no. Please. No!”
“Keep breathing, that’s all you have to do. You breathe,” Ferron said, his expression drawn. The muscles in his jaw were taut.
He turned to glare at Stroud without letting go.
“You know she is prone to fits. You cannot spring something like that on her,” he said in a low voice.
Stroud straightened. “You said she was afraid of shadows. If she’s going to keep adding things perpetually, you should make a list and put them up on the wall somewhere.” She rolled her eyes, arms crossed at her chest. “Shouldn’t she be glad to know the conception efforts are over?”
“No. And you should have known that. I’m beginning to think you’re purposely torturing her. Why is that?”
“I’m not,” Stroud said, too quickly.
Ferron’s eyes narrowed. “Do be honest. You won’t enjoy the way I take answers.”
Stroud paled, eyes darting towards the door, as if measuring the distance. “The High Necromancer says that she’s the one who bombed the West Port Lab. We’d won. It was our victory day, and she—she killed Bennet! His years of work. My work. All our experiments. She destroyed all of it.”
There was a long pause, and Ferron’s eyes turned to slits.
“I appreciate you have a fanatical devotion to his memory, but psychologically torturing a prisoner does very little when she has no memory that it even happened. Neither your program nor your rank grant you personal revenge on my prisoner.”
He let go of Helena, turning on Stroud, pulling off his gloves. “You appear to have forgotten that I do not suffer fools tampering with her. I have gone to considerable expense and effort to maintain her environment, regardless of how inflated your sense of importance is over being outside of the lab when it exploded. The only reason you hold any rank whatsoever is because those more suited to the task are all dead. If anything, you should be grateful to her. You’d be no one now if anyone else had survived.”
Stroud went white, nostrils flaring. “I worked at Bennet’s side. My repopulation program is—”
“A farce. A convenient cover for the High Necromancer to achieve his ends and sate the endless appetites of his loyalists,” Ferron sneered at her. “The only reason you survived was because you were a glorified lab assistant, sent off to retrieve new subjects. Without Shiseo, you’d have nothing to show for your time running Central. You think it isn’t noticeable how little you’ve produced since his departure? It’s no wonder you were so eager to launch your repopulation program.”
Ferron had that same scathing, unrelenting intensity that he’d levelled upon Aurelia. “After you threatened to commandeer my assignation, I investigated your little project. You boast so freely to the papers, I was curious to see what remarkable data you must have to show for it. I was something of an academic myself once. Do you mind telling me about your controls? Or the statistics and historical data? No matter where I look, I can only find anecdotes in unsubstantiated newspaper articles.”
“Things—are st-still in the early stages—” Stroud stammered, her face now a stark combination of white with red-stained cheeks. “I am a legitimate—”
